people forget that downtown RVA was literally built before cars existed, so its intrinsically a great foundation for pedestrian, bike and non-car traffic.

>faded and discolored brick with graffiti is more in-line with historical standards than an awesome mural

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i'm betting that will be their decision

>the beauty of capitalism is nobody cares about your opinion.

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fun fact, markets do indeed care about people's opinions.

Tweek the inner turn lane.

Wild that half the usable land area in that picture is just parking.

I love the thought of a huge housing development surrounding the grave of a slave owning president who thought that black people just couldn't assimilate if freed.

If we exhumed every corpse from there, got rid of the gravestones but retained some built structures, and named the area "cool nice place park" the benefits would be the same --- This has everything to do with how its designed environment, and nothing to do with the fact that dead people lay there.

Compare Maury cemetary to Hollywood.Or compare Hollywood to the cementary literally right next to it. Hollywood is nice because its got all the things a good park has --- a built environment, trees and shade, and easy proximity to amenities.

Whereas Maury is next to nothing, has zero trees and shade, and effectively no built environment. Riverview Cemetery has 1 of the 3 things.....similar proximity to actual social life, but lacks any trees and built environment.

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The lesson is that cemetery's can be good parks, if they're designed like good parks.

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There ain't nobody going for a stroll around Maury Cemetery, or playing football with their kid or whatever.

They're equivalent to me. Preserve whatever specific plots you want, like James Monroe, or whoever. Allow people to build up around it.

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Or don't. The guy is dead. Its not like he'd care.

I live within in walking distance of Maury Cemetery, and if the city decided to bulldoze that place, and zone if for mixed use, sprinkle in some subsidized units for good luck.... I wouldn't shed a tear.

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And neither would the general market, because its not like proximity to the cemetery and its, I assume important historical value, is doing much for value of land of the surrounding area.

I don't think a cementary is a usable green space that is even remotely analogous to a park

whenever you see the word real in something like real income or real wages in a dataset like this, it means its adjusted for inflation.

> It would be a slap in the face to this community to pave it over for an apartment complex

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don't we have a housing shortage? isn't that housing shortage felt most acutely on people akin to this community? isn't that shortage caused by historical land-use segregation that resulted in widespread inequities that are preserved still to this day?

>stagnant wages

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doesn't look flat to me

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Besides, absent land rents, capital share of net income isn't even that great

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class conflict is a nice theory if you need to a distant other to blame when you have actual market power from economic classes

but for locally caused problems -low public amenities, poor schools, underperforming infrastructure, high housing costs, pockets of intractable crime are all entirely RVA's locally sourced problems...and is it really the uber-rich causing the poor performance the these things?

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take this bonkers of a story. kinda hard to blame jeff bezo's for unsafe streets when its the residents themselves that turned out to protest improving them

> and the Capitalist class.

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what exactly is that

The reason they make any profit is because people have strong demand for where they put them.

their

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you mean the consumers? of course consumers are going to only choose the options that are best for them. which is why having more options gives residents more options to optimize over.

explain to me again why the city is on the hook for a private business expense?

If people want to live in high rise, its great urban planning. The idea that housing needs to be segregated into blocks comprise of only one style is absurd, and the market has expressed deep desire to get rid of it.

>In San Diego, developers can build eight story buildings without parking 25 blocks into neighborhoods.

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bummer its not 10 stories. housing for people > housing for cars

Taxing the rental market more wouldn't lower prices and would worsen the problem you're trying to solve.

>Before the city council changed the rules, Mission Playground was a public good open to all. After the rules changed, it became in part a privately held commodity, open only to those with the knowledge and means to pay for it.

This is where the analysis starts to fall apart.

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Lets recap how the land was previously allocated by residents:

>If there wasn’t enough space for everyone, some played while others watched from the sidelines. Once one team scored, the losing team would trade places with those who’d been on the sidelines. Sooner or later, everyone got a chance to play.

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So we have some scarce resource and we need a way to allocate it amongst consumers. Not everybody can use it at once, its limited in scope, and people will want to make sure its use is maximized during peak times.

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Imagine a simple player model:

You have some time budget on how long you can just be out there, T, some time on the field K, and a likelihood that you'll be picked to play, S. And utility gained from playing U(K/T).

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So your condition is ensuring that U(K/T) = S(K/T), that the benefit to you from playing always at least has to be equal to the likelihood and time of you actually playing the game. If U(K/T) < S(K/T), then you'll leave and do something else. If U(K/T) >S(K/T), then you'll wait till its your turn.

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The problem with this is if demand for the field increases, there are more people on the sidelines, so the likelihood of getting picked falls, and the time spent on the sideline rises. S shrinks, T grows. So you'd have to somehow magically get way more utility from playing a smaller amount.

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That isn't sustainable.

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A permit simplifies things. Imagine permit costs C, you have some friends F to split the cost with, and so your spending, P, is P = C/F. Since its just you and your friends, there is no waiting on the sidelines, S is 100%, and you spend all the time on the field, so K= T, so now we have

U(K) = C/F. As long as the utility gained from playing soccer at least equals the individual share of the permit costs, you'll get the permit.

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The author is heading in the wrong direction. It was never really a "public" good, it functioned as a private good where its both excludable and rivalrous --, and its allocation was fragile, dependent on some really circumstantial rules that people tacitly agreed to because demand for the field was relatively low, and the cost of abiding by the time was also low. But as demand grows, these rules would break down and we would need a different way to allocate it to people -- a way that is more visible and clear to all.

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>then it seems that what the protestors were fundamentally objecting to was the practice of treating housing as just a commodity. For when housing is treated as just a commodity, residential landlords have a right to exclude tenants from their homes whenever they can no longer afford whatever rent the landlord demands. Writ large, this right of exclusion produces displacement and housing insecurity

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The rest of the article is basically not-answering the basic question:

How do landlords retain price setting power? Do all landlords have this power? Does a landlord in no-where Wisconsin have the same market power as a landlord in The Mission? Why, why not? If landlord surplus is rising, how come other landlords are entering to capture that excess profit?

Why don't the people who are renting buy a home to protect themselves from cost inflation? Can they? Why or why not? Why did that lady rent for years after watching her rent rise? etc.

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You gotta answer those questions before trying to your hand a policy proposal. Because if you get those answers wrong, the solution derived from it would also be wrong.

There is alot variation in electric retail markets, Texas has the most expansive retail competition. Comparing Texas and California retail markets is an interesting case study in market design -- with California creating some counter-productive incentives that led to the 2001 outages, Enron and all that.

>The point of the RGGI is to incentivize the switch to non-carbon power. That incentive doesn’t work if the decision makers can just pass the cost on to consumers

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there is no incentive for people to reduce carbon emissions if carbon emissions remain underpriced. not pricing it into consumer choices results in people overemitting carbon

Same demand + reduced short term supply = higher prices

If there was a looming recession, we would expect a fall in demand

A fall in demand would mean that firms would loose money by raising prices

Price gouging would indicate the economy is not in recession